Although its old news, you may have recently heard that secure SSL certificates will actually receive some benefits in their rankings according to google.

Setting up SSL can be difficult if you are not very technical and haven’t really done it before. So I thought I would give you a quick crash course in how to set it up.

This guide is a step by step guide on setting it up. You are probably wondering why i have created an article about hostgator yet I have negatively publicised them in a previous post – this is purely for the benefit of my readers as I know many of you are with hostgator.

Step 1 – Generate a CSR

You don’t need to know too much about what this is exactly – the most important thing you need to know is how to generate it. Click on this link to generate it (don’t close this tab – keep it open!).

Fill in the details appropriately as illustrated below. Once you have completed your details click ‘GENERATE CSR’

Step 2 – Buy an SSL certificate

There are lots of places selling them and you can either get them really cheap or be totally ripped off for exactly the same certificate! Hostgator charges $50 for their one so it’s probably not a good idea to use their one. The one I most often use is RapidSSL. It costs around $11.99 and it does the job well. You should always make sure your SSL certificate has at least 2048 bit encryption. Don’t bother with anything less. Go ahead and buy this now by clicking here.

Add the SSL certificate to your cart and check out. I don’t think there is any point in showing you that part.

Once you have done that and your payment is approved you will be able to manage your ssl certificates. You can click on manage SSL certificates in your dashboard menu at name cheap:

Once you have done that you will see your ssl certificate come up in the menu. At this point you need to click ACTIVATE

You will then be presented with the following screen. Just go ahead and choose cPanel as the web server. You will notice below there is a notepad field for your CSR. As you generated this earlier from hostgator you should go and copy and paste the code in here.

Once you have done that go ahead and click next:

After clicking next you will see a screen that asks you to select one of your email addresses from the screen. It’s best to select the one that looks like [email protected] If you don’t have this set up then you should log into your cPanel and create an email forwarder. You will need this so you can continue. It’s easy enough.

Once you have selected an email address from the list (preferably [email protected]) go ahead and click next.

You may see a silly error like this:

Just click on ‘i confirm this message does not apply to me’.

You will then be asked to fill in some address details, etc, etc. Just go ahead and do those and then finally ‘submit order’.

If you have done everything correctly you should see something that looks like this on your screen:

Step 3 – Check your email

You will receive an email from RapidSSL. You will be asked to click on a link. This basically proves to rapid ssl that you are the domain owner.

Once you click on the authorisation link look at the bottom and click on ‘I approve’.

If everything has gone well you will receive one more email from RapidSSL with your SSL certificate. In fact the email will contain an SSL Certificate and a CA. You will need both of these for the next step:

Over the years it’s absolutely astounding how quickly your domain portfolio grows. There are domains out there I totally forgot I even owned.

One of the worst things we tend to do is buy domains from multiple registrars.

The biggest problem with that is you are making life a lot more difficult for yourself. Streamlining your practices is definitely the best way to go.

In terms of domain registrar I would definitely recommend NameCheap. There are several reasons why I would recommend them to SEO experts.

Firstly, as their name suggests, they are one of the cheapest. The second reason is they offer free whois protection with each domain. The reason I like whois protection is simply because I own so many domains and I don’t necessarily want my personal details showing on them. The final reason why I prefer to use name cheap as my preferred domain registrar is they don’t bump up their prices at renewal time.

What pisses me off entirely about domain registrars like Godaddy and crazy domain is they slap you with a domain price that’s virtually double what you paid at the beginning.

My advice is streamline your service providers and bulk transfer all your domains right at the start. It will help you immensely as your portfolio grows.

Oh and one more thing – ensure you don’t tick the option that allows the registrar to ‘auto renew’. Being in the SEO game you are consistently buying and dropping domains so it’s probably a good idea to evaluate these year on year to see if they are still valuable to you.

I’m sure this topic has been done to death. But I’m not here to sell you an ebook or indulge you in a get rich quick scheme or for that matter sell you anything at all.

For the last 5 or 6 years I have tried very hard to make a sale online. My success was minimal. My expenses and effort to make money were very quickly starting to deflate my confidence and I eventually gave up for a while.

There are marketers online that will try and sell you blueprints promising a step by step guide on how to make money. I’m sure you have already been sucked into one of them if you are reading this page. Some of them even have the audacity to play with your emotions ever further by showing photos of their so multi million dollar homes and try brainwashing you even further with more pics of what your life could be like if you became like them.

My advice here is simple.

STAY AWAY.

They are all trying to sell you something and they are all leading you down a path of disappointment.

These types of marketers should be ashamed of themselves. They are as evil as it gets prying on poor innocent people. Their pathetic squeeze pages, call to action content, poorly written ebooks were never designed to make you money. The next time you come across a squeeze page like this and feel tempted to buy something I want you to remember this scene from The wolf of Wall Street where he sells penny stocks:

Point of the video kids: Don’t get sucked in.

The reality is that you CAN make money online. Granted, it’s not as easy as it once was. The ability to rank and to maintain a healthy position in the search engine rankings is getting more difficult.

But your ability to make money online truly has to do with you and ONLY YOU. You need to think outside the box and work on those unsaturated niches.

You can go ahead and look for some inspiration for niche ideas through Commission junction (recently renamed to CJ affiliate by Conversant. But there are soooo many more out there for you to choose outside of those realms.

The difference between how i make money online and the traditional methods taught online is that i see mundane things we do and explore in every day life and adapt them to my keyword research methodology. On occasion i reach a dead end – but most of the time I hit the jackpot because I don’t try and copy what others are doing. Yes I will go and check out my competitors to get some metrics but I will only look at their work as inspiration to make mine even better.

Making money online is difficult but not impossible. Don’t give up. Think outside the box. Trust your inner guide and follow your instinct when you think you have potentially discovered a good niche and the fruits of your labor will eventually come to fruition.

So you fancy yourself a wizard, an SEO expert, a black hatter, white hatter or grey hatter? Whether you want to admit it or not you are probably dabbling in the dark arts.

All too often you hear about ‘white hat’ or ‘grey hat’. You and I both know its a load of BS. If you are attempting to rank by creating artificial links, unnatural in every way, then you have joined the dark side.

I’m not here to judge or to tell you that you are hanging out with bad company.

What I will say is that much like joining any other club, there should be some basic rules that you should follow. At the end of the day you are all trying to achieve the same goals and that is to rank and bank. So I have come up with what I believe are the 10 commandments that all self confessed affiliate marketers, blackhat experts and dabblers of the dark arts should follow:

1. Thou shalt not negative SEO

The term negative SEO is being thrown around a lot. The idea that you would hurt one of your competitors by throwing negative links towards their site is absolutely disgusting. This is not the spirit of the game. We are all in it for the same reasons. By throwing your competitor off their perch you are essentially starting an avalanche of events that will follow and ultimately cannibalise your niche. Karma is a bitch and I assure you that by engaging in negative SEO against your other colleagues you are not going to stay at the top for very long. If blackhat is your poison then use it; but not against your competitors.

2. Thou shalt not disavow

So, you have been hit with a manual penalty. You panic. You start to do some research and realise that perhaps you can save your site by disavowing your old links. Now wait a minute….

Do you even realise what you are doing here? By disavowing you are essentially taking down an entire network of sites and links.. all because you want to save one of your sites. Disavow is nothing more than crowd sourcing. You are assisting someone else to discover bad links and you are doing it for free. Just cut your losses and move on. Don’t feed the disavow machine at all possible cost!

3. Thou shalt not report

So you are struggling to reach the top. You get a brilliant idea that you could report your competitors and get them deindexed. Bad idea! This is as callous as negative SEO attacks. At the same time you may be well unknowingly destroying a link network… one that you may also belong to.

4. Thou shalt not steal…some things

You have just discovered a cool niche and you become excited about it. So rather than creating your own videos or content you decide to steal someone else’s. You terrible human being! lol. Look, I understand that we all ‘borrow’ stuff from the net. But I think that it’s a sin to steal videos and work from your competitors. Create your own or borrow from elsewhere! How would you feel if another marketer stole your stuff?

5. Thou shalt not …..huh?

Okay so my 10 commandments are not exactly complete. But that’s all I could think of at the moment. If you believe you have any others that should be added to the list then please comment below.